about you now
Straddling your thighs on a king-sized bed six floors above Hudson,
you cup my shoulder and tell me it’s worth a poem.
“I’d like to see it,” I say.
“In five years,” you reply smiling,
the water that protects your eyes ringed with sunshine
and a few minutes later you’re shitting—
the shower running so I can’t hear your stool
splash and sink—while I inspect my shoulder speckled
with moles and freckles, sprouting hairs and wonder
how you will depict us in verse. Three hours later,
over three pints of beer we confess
why we’re still single:
you
gag on your toothbrush
due to your father’s early
insistence on stellar oral hygiene and
I
laugh easily at my own jokes even
though they’re only in my head
and then
over dinner
we begin to uncurl
our spiraled
selves
and
I
describe
the first time
I was kissed,
the first time
I was raped
and
you
describe seven years lost
to party drugs that numbed
an unrelenting ache
and it may have been a gorgeous night
or it might have been that I was enamored
with your presence
so that every skein
of sky carried the softness
of your presence
and the softness
returned to your eyes
at the Duplex after 1 AM
when the piano man began
the opening riff to “Wonderwall”
and you
half-opened your mouth
to an operatic British baritone,
I don’t believe that anybody
feels the way I do
about you now
and I replied, in kind,
finding your eyes glowing again
struck by the impossibility
of their shine in a bar
without sun
untitled
for the last time i lose myself to loneliness the dirt of the oak tree made more liveable by the air around it? dust i think it’s called i keep making small square patterns with my hands
i don’t trust anyone called the devil because i (no my kind) have been called the devil unconvincingly so many times what’s with your words and their separate station? are you meeting these humans that i know we have created together? the history of us is so much bigger than this disease and yet i keep going back to this spot this trauma on the shirt of legacy. my mind drops past (past past pst pst pst ps ps ps ps t t t)
the run on/of impossible filigrees. myself and this community. we keep rocking our selves past our past. we keep sleeping past the alarm. we keep injuring ourselves on the words they created.
Jason Lipeles is a Los-Angeles-based poet, performance artist, human-being-with-feelings. He is an alum of the AJU/Asylum Arts’ Reciprocity Artist Retreat. He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Image + Text from Ithaca College in 2018.
jasonlipeles.com
The Los Angeles Press 